Friday, June 22, 2012

All seriousness (WHEDON WEEK - Part Four)

Here’s something a little odd that I’ve noticed about Joss Whedon’s
works as a whole, something that I was reminded of during The Cabin in
the Woods. Wait, wait, come back! I promise this isn’t going to be
another 2000 words about Cabin! It’s just a starting point, so hang
in there.

Although much of the pleasure of watching Cabin in the Woods comes
from the fact that the layers of stories are simultaneously somewhat
familiar and yet a little bit off, and the audience (particularly the
horror buffs therein) must try to figure out exactly what is going on
and why (until Sigourney Weaver makes the Big Explanatory Speech at
the end), there is a viewpoint character of sorts: Truman, who is a
kind of generic security enforcer within the facility from which the
sacrifice scenarios are orchestrated. Truman is newly assigned to the
operation, so he gets to ask the questions which prompt the other
characters to provide exposition to things they already know. And
when things start to go off the rails in the third act, Truman is
basically the only one who expresses any doubts about what the
facility is responsible for unleashing. Within Cabin’s world,
everyone who works at the facility is to some extent twisted and
arguably evil, whereas Truman is noble and uncorrupted, and pretty
stoic to boot.

Truman is portrayed by Brian White. Brian White happens to be black.
He is, in fact, the only black character in the movie (with any lines,
at any rate) which is not exactly a social critique I am leveling at
Whedon, or not one I’m going to single him out for, at any rate. Most
mainstream Hollywood movies have predominantly white casts, and to a
certain extent you could even argue that the direct homage to classic
slasher flicks necessitates a somewhat non-diverse collection of
characters. And there is a biracial actor in the cast, as well: Jesse
Williams, who plays one of the five teens trapped in the titular
cabin. Tellingly, he plays Holden, aka The Scholar archetype. Not
The Jock, and definitely not The Fool. The bookish, serious
one.

Not too long after I saw Cabin in the Woods, my wife and watched a few
episodes of Buffy, including “Beauty and the Beasts” which is an
Oz-centric episode which just happens to include the one and only
appearance of Buffy’s school counselor, Mr. Platt. Mr. Platt is
solicitous and sincere. He’s also black. I think that was the moment
where this entire trend really solidified in my mind.

I should state upfront that I think it is an unmitigatedly good thing
when actors of color are cast in parts that don’t inherently have some
kind of racial component. Truman, Holden and Mr. Platt could all have
just as easily been white guys and it wouldn’t have changed the
stories (their individual arcs or the encompassing narratives) an
iota. I certainly don’t think that if a black actor gets a part it
should be because that’s the only logical choice, because the
character is some kind of inner-city stereotype or whatever.

Here’s what’s weird, though. Arguably one of Whedon’s greatest
strengths is his aptitude for witty dialogue. He can pull off epics
of fantasy, blend mythology and modern life with metaphoric resonance,
and he’s hugely into strong female characters who make the world a
better place for gender relations, but on top of all that, he is
really funny. If you polled a bunch of Whedon fans about their
favorite characters, I suspect you’d get a lot of Xander from Buffy,
and Wash from Firefly, or Anya from Buffy (my favorite) or Oz (my
wife’s). And what those characters all have in common is that they
are quick with the one-liners, non-sequitors or sarcastic asides or
whatnot. To some extent, they’re clowns, and the audience may be just
as likely to be laughing at them in their cluelessness or
inappropriate behavior as with them and their incisive/acerbic
commentary. But by just about any measure, they’re often the best
part of any episode.

But Xander and Anya and Oz and Wash are all white. If you start
running through other prominent black characters from the Whedonverse,
you can’t help but notice that the Venn diagram of “funny characters”
and “black characters” has zero overlap. There’s Kendra the vampire
slayer from season two of Buffy, and Principal Wood from season seven.
Kendra is so serious it’s like she has no emotions at all (her
backstory is she was raised to be a slayer from birth, with little to
no time for personal growth) and Principal Wood has the tragic
background of being the orphan son of a murdered-slayer mother. Over
in Firefly, there’s the bounty hunter Jubal Early, and in the movie
Serenity there’s the man known only as The Operative. Both are
straight as heart attacks, with weird villainous codes of honor. Of
course those codes make a nice contrast with Mal Reynolds, who is
highly morally flexible but still the hero of the saga, but the fact
remains, honorable is rarely funny.

In The Avengers, Nick Fury is played by Samuel L. Jackson. He gets a
couple of pretty good lines off in the course of the movie, including
one that really made me laugh, but never in a situation where Fury is
trying to be funny. (The big laughline for me was about gamma
radiation sometimes being dangerous, which is a massive
understatement since gamma rays created the Hulk, which is more of an
inside between-Whedon-and-the-comic-nerds-in-the-audience joke since
Hulk hasn’t been properly introduced into the narrative at that
point.)

If I’m going to go all armchair psychologist (and it’s my blog, so why
the hell not) it’s almost as though Whedon’s thought process has
consistently gone something like this: he feels a deep commitment to
promoting diversity. Therefore, he will include black characters in
his stories. However, he refuses to traffic in negative stereotypes
in any way shape or form. So much so, in fact, that he will
deliberately avoid even the slightest semblance of such. No one will
ever be able to accuse him of minstrelsy. No one can say “the black
guy is just there as ethnic comic relief.” Quite the contrary. There
will be nothing comical about the black character at all. Ever. Not
even in the cool, fun, everybody loves the jokester, everybody loves
that about Whedon’s writing kind of way. The black character will be
taken seriously because the black character will take him/herself
very, very, extremely, crushingly seriously.

Which kind of makes me wonder what would happen if Whedon made a black
character his main protagonist in some future story. Because Buffy
Summers and Mal Reynolds and Tony Stark? They get off amazing
punchlines all the time, too, in between their moments of pathos and
their bouts of kicking ass and taking names. Which would win out –
Whedon’s standard heroic template, or his standard no-clowning stance
on persons of color?

I may be conjuring conclusions where they aren’t really merited. I’ve
only seen a few episodes each of Angel and Dollhouse and for all I
know there’s a hilarious, sardonic, popcult-savvy snark-meister who
also happens to be black in either or both of those shows. But the
trend as I see it is the trend as I see it, and I think it’s kind of a
shame. I came up with the hypothetical train of justification above
in large part because I can understand it. I empathize totally with
wanting to do the right thing and trying to safeguard it from
accidentally turning into the wrongest thing. But at the same time I
believe that the best path toward equality is found in actually
treating people as equals, not in treating certain people with
exaggerated deference to make up for the past or overcompensate for
prejudices. Portraying a gravitas-wreathed black character without a
hint of shucking and/or jiving might give (sheltered, white) people a
new way of thinking about others of different backgrounds, but maybe
doling out the trademark Whedon-zingers equitably might cause
(sheltered, white) people to stop seeing the superficial differences
at all?

1 comment:

Well, Shepherd Book got a number of good lines on Firefly. Of course, that show only lasted half a season.

For the two shows you mentioned you had not seen:

There was a major black character on Angel. He was part of the mix in regards to having some good lines. He wasn't a clown, though, and he went from being a street fighter of vampires to a lawyer (via a dark magic upgrade.)

Dollhouse had a major black character, but he was serious most of the time.

You may be interested in my "All Things Joss Whedon" category. You can find the parent post here: http://www.tipsfromchip.blogspot.com/2011/05/all-things-joss-whedon.html